A Butterfly

From the booklet that comes with RahXephon Orchestration 3:

One day about sunset, Zhuangi dozed off and dreamed that he turned into a butterfly. He flapped his wings and sure enough, he was a butterfly... What a joyful feeling as he fluttered about, he completly forgot that he was Zhuangi. Soon though, he realized that that proud butterfly was really Zhuangi who dreamed he was a butterfly, or was it a butterfly who dreamed he was Zhuangi! Maybe Zhuangi was the butterfly, and maybe the butterfly was Zhuangi?

"I Dreamt I Was A Butterfly"
Zhuang Zi

Responce to an introduction

Letter from Turkish and Kurdish anarchists to Murray Bookchin

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The following is a letter we have written to Bookchin in regard to the Turkish translation of his book, "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm"

Dear Murray Bookchin,

We have just received the Turkish translation of your book, "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm", Kaos Yayinlari, Istanbul, May 1998, translated by Deniz Aytas.

The reading of the book overtook every other practical matter in our group and a consequent discussion was followed. We, an anarchist group, felt that some clarifications are needed since the author of the book happens to be Bookchin, a lifetime revolutionary, and the name on many anarchist theoretical writings.

All in all, the arguments put forward are very interesting as they address some crucial issues discussed in anarchist movements in North America and Europe. Our main concern is the introduction, written by yourself specifically for the Turkish translation of the book, and its implications for the newly emerging anarchist movement in Turkey.

In your Introduction - if the translation is accurate - you stated that you were shocked to see that Zen Buddhism - Taoism and lifestyle anarchism, the popular new tendencies in North America and Europe, are also spreading to Turkey. When we first saw those lines we were completely taken aback and failed to understand the relevance of such a statement with the issues facing the anarchist movement in Turkey. Later, through discussions we reached the conclusion that you, understandably enough, are not familiar with politics in Turkey and such information must have come from the Turkish publisher.

First of all, we must deal with the issue of spreading Zen Buddhism - Taoism and hastily add that such a problem is not even being discussed in Turkish anarchist circles since it simply does not exist! Turkey is a country dominated by Islam and its culture has no historical or philosophical connections with the beliefs and religions in question. It would suffice to say that so far, we have not seen any article or reference to the issue, either for or against, in any anarchist writings in Turkey.

The crucial point of the introduction is the bit making references to lifestyle anarchism. This is a controversial issue, which mostly relates to Western anarchist movements, but we have to say that it has no bearing on the Turkish and Kurdish radical movements. Here, we are talking about a country in which the father of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner, is yet to be translated (we have seen one article only translated into Turkish in Germany, in 1988) let alone the American theoreticians mentioned in your book. Therefore such criticism have no actual audience in Turkey. What we are left with is the radical young generation which rebels against their patriarchal family structure and the authoritarian Turkish establishment. In their rebellious way, they feel the need of using some marginal symbols and insignia. But above all, their intentions are revolutionary. As we mentioned earlier, Turkey has just started to experience the emergence of anarchist movement. As you will agree, all radical upsurges of social unrest in history had past through similar eccentric stages and we do not believe that you meant to criticise such naivety.

As you will agree again, a particular approach or criticism may well be relevant to a particular movement or a country but that particularity would not necessarily apply to another country which has its own unique particulars and is going through entirely different phases. Today, the crucial question of anarchism in Turkey is how to create a libertarian alternative to the centralist-authoritarian traditional left as the anarchist movement of Turkey is rising from the ashes of longstanding orthodox Marxist and Stalinist left. In turkey, under such circumstances, to identify the problem as drawing a line between lifestyle anarchism and social anarchism is simply the call of the old blood. The people who badly needed such an intervention by "an external anarchist authority" kave knowingly misled you about the nature of the problem and tried to manipulate the situation. Sadly, those are the anarchists who still suffer from similar old authoritarian traditional habits.

With solidarity,

5th May Group

(Turkish and Kurdish Anarchists in Exile)

c/o PO Box 2474
London N8
United Kingdom

Memories of Afghanistan

My Summer Vacation in Afghanistan is an essay from Peter Lamborn Wilson about his travels in that land. Not sure exactly when he wrote it but it's obviously after 9/11. It's an interesting view of what the land was like before things started going down hill for them.

Interview with Peter L Wilson

Interview with Wilson. Another maintence thing.

The Wandering Sufi
Into the Mystic with Peter Lamborn Wilson

by Erik Davis

Originally appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement,
February, 1994


The exotic desires uncorked by travel make for a messy romance, blending recognition and projection a crush on the Other. Muzaffarabad, Zamboanga, Babdaroon for Westerners, can these fail to seduce? (Okay, Babdaroon is from Lord Dunsany). Unfortunately, for the last
half millennium, Westerners have courted travel in empire's brothel. Today the recognition of this imperialist imagination has led to a refreshing political deconstruction of exoticism, whether of the "primitive" or the Orient. But in some corners, this has led folks to stifle all desires for alien encounter as unworkably suspect, problematic, and dangerous...as if any manifestation of the unfettered imagination could not be suspect, problematic and dangerous.

Unconsciously echoing those who warn that the world's dwindling diversity of plants and animals makes for a more disaster-prone biosphere, many multiculturalists want to promote or "preserve" diversity. But differences that are preserved in a jar become ethnonationalisms, whereas fruitful difference blooms on the edges, at the margins of empires, faiths, canonical rhythms. Here we find images that themselves travel, expressing their specificity while pulling the magic carpet out from under fixed identities. The question in a postcolonial culture is not how to "respect" difference, but how to embrace it, and spawn more.

For the underground anarcho-Sufi scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson, the answer lies in spiritual heresy. For over a decade beginning in the late 60s, Wilson wandered from North Africa to India to Java, but spent the bulk of his time in Iran. He explored the heterodox nooks and crannies of Islam, a religion the West caricatures as fanatically monolithic but which Wilson's voluminous reading, Sufi practices, and face-to-face encounters with sorcerers, Satanists, and hash-smoking dervishes proved to possess one of the world's richest and most diverse living mysticisms. Now ensconced in Manhattan, Wilson has ended his expatriot days, but he remains a cultural and intellectual nomad a true free-thinker.

Though the bulk of his work explores the historical and mystical dimensions of Sufism and Islamic heresy, Wilson has also translated books of Persian poetry, written on angels and early American spiritual anarchism, and penned science fiction and a few pseudonymous manifestos. Every other Tuesday, his free-ranging "Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade" broadcasts on WBAI, and he lectures regularly at the New York Open Center and other local venues on topics ranging from hermeticism to Dada anthropology to dragons to "chaos linguistics" in Chung Tzu. He's published high and low, from SF zines to Studies in Mystical Literature to Semiotext(e), which as a member of the Autonomedia collective he helps publish. And they still won't let him into a university library in New York.

As an underground intellectual, Wilson is particularly suited to tapping the underground streams of religious history both the truths that canonical authorities keeps hidden, and the shadows of truth that haunt history like a genie. As Wilson demonstrates, heresies most often occur far from the legislating center, and his own heretical studies have put him knee-deep in apocrypha, secret histories, occult symbols, magic pamphlets, and popular art.

These explorations not only move him from history into exoticism, but introduce a magical mode of textuality: recombinant, luminous, fragmentary. As he writes in Sacred Drift, "In the world of apocrypha the images of established religion and canonical texts acquire a kind of mutability, a tendency to drift, to reflect the subjectivities of the (often anonymous) visionaries who sift through fragments in order to produce more fragments...The world of apocrypha is a world of books made real...The apocryphal imagination turns 'Tibet' or 'Egypt' into an amulet or mantram with which to unlock an 'other world,' most real in books and dreams and dreams of books."

Wilson is more than willing to navigate this no-man's land, but unlike many fringe thinkers, revisionists and spiritual autodidacts, he never lapses into kook logic or shallow rants. For an anarchist, he has a remarkably traditional respect for rigor and cautious argument, as well as a great love for the dusty bibliographies and arcane disputes of classic scholarship. Still, he hates the academic world, and thanks God that a trickle of family money keeps him "independently poor." This marginality grants him little status, for as he points out, "in America, the concept of an independent scholar is a null set."

Which is a shame, not only because he's one of the few Americans writing about Islamic culture for a popular (or at least hipster) audience, but because his essays and lectures argue for the ultimate unity of imagination and intellectual investigation. Despite all his footnotes, Wilson is ultimately less interested in historicity than what he calls "poetic facts," insurrectionary images that puncture history.  And he's more than willing to inhale on the opium smoke of exoticism to conjure them up.

Sacred Drift picks up the thread from his earlier collection Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, which remains in many ways a more scandalous book. Along with discussions of Javanese shadow-puppets and the Assassins (the heretical order led by Hassan-i Sabbah, whose dictum "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" was famously imported by William Burroughs), Scandal includes material that even today's rather jaded audience would find heretical.  Besides praising the mystical use of hashish (and including a recipe for the cannabis brew bhang), the essay "The Imaginal Game" offers a sympathetic portrayal of "sacred pedophilia," the practice of staring at beautiful boys as a kind of "imaginal yoga."

Sacred Drift wanders through similarly marginal territory, from Islamic Satanists to some playful Rumi translations to a profound discussion of the problems of sexuality and authority in modern Sufism. But the heart of the book is the title essay, which uncovers the "nomadosophy" of heretical Islam via Situationism, Islamic travel narratives, and the delightful figures of the flying carpet and of Kzehr, the Green Man of the Koran. The spirit of this wonderful mosaic is best summed up by a line of Rumi that precedes the essay: "Journey forth from your own self / to God's Self voyage without end."

"I admit to being a romantic," Wilson tells me as he lights up a Camel straight in his messy, funky apartment in Alphabet City. I had asked him about Said's famous critique of Orientalism. "Romanticism is definitely part of the problem he's identifying, and Orientalism in general does lead to fantasy. But fantasy reveries, childhood dreams, fancies and magical images is not entirely to be despised." It was by becoming infatuated with such exotic fantasies that Wilson first began his relationship to Islam which is itself a perfect anticipation of the imaginative spiritual erotics he later found in Sufi poetry, in which the mundane self is annihilated through a radical romantic infatuation with the other, the "Beloved."

To describe his anti-colonialist embrace of the East, Wilson prefers the term "orientalismo" an echo of the "tropicalismo" that freaked-out Brazilian intellectuals used to describe their mad cannibalism of First World culture in the late '60s. For him, the trick is not to shackle the nomadic imagination but to refuse "gaping at cultures or trying to appropriate their spiritual sap without paying any karmic dues."  With his translations of Sufi poetry, collected in The Drunken Universe and elsewhere, Wilson gets around the problem of appropriation by co-translating with native Persian speakers.

Wilson derives his romantic image of cross-pollinating cultural exchange from the syncretisms, mutual poachings, and heretical countercultures that litters the history of religions. He points out that what he calls "fortuitous mistranslations" of one cultures often mobilize "new insurrectionary modes of cultural thought" in another. A casebook example of "heresy as cultural transfer" is Beat Zen, one of the primal inspirations for the white drop-outs who inspired the countercultural tradition that Wilson himself still very much carries on. "The first incursions of Zen into America were from Japanese of dubious orthodoxy and I would even included D.T. Suzuki in that category. Then you had a lot of Americans who 'didn't understand it,' and they made their own thing out of their fortuitous mistranslation. Something about Zen filled the bill. In terms of Japanese scholarship, they were wrong. But in terms of the spirit, it seems they were right.

"What was happening was precisely what Zen itself calls 'beginner's mind.' After centuries, something radically new was happening to Zen, and unfortunately Zen was not able to appreciate it, because Zen soon moved in the Roshis. 'Fine, fine, you're into Zen?  Here's the real Zen.' And the real Zen turned out to be just another fucking despotism. Even giving orthodoxy it's due, they shouldn't have stamped out those embers. Because it had that benefit of beginner's mind, that sweetheart situation, Beat Zen made Buddhism what it is today: the biggest Oriental religion in America. That's how you get things like the TV show Kung Fu. A lot of Oriental stuff seeped into that stupid show, and created a whole generation of people for whom it was part of their universe of discourse."

For Wilson, a more important instance of "heresy as cultural transfer" occurred early this century in the work of Noble Drew Ali, the African American whose imaginative mixture of Masonry, esoteric Christianity, and his own visionary dreams of Egypt led to everything from Elijah Mohammad to hip-hop's 5 Percent Nation. As Wilson says, "Drew Ali's a real American prophet, the black man with a Cherokee feather stuck in his fez the perfect image of everything I wish America were and isn't." In Sacred Drift, Wilson seeks the poetic fact of Noble Drew Ali, drawing not only from historical materials but from conversations with old-timers and pamphlets bought from incense-sellers in Times Square. "This is in fact the real opening of Islam in America. It's only long after that you find middle-class white people becoming interested in Sufism."

One of the those middle-class white persons was, of course, Peter Lamborn Wilson. He discovered the curious legacy of Drew Ali in 1964, when he met the hipsters who founded the Moorish Orthodox Church, an offshoot of Nobel Drew Ali's original Moorish Science Temple. In 1968, reacting to "the collapse of the political into spectacle," Wilson left America. Like many "feckless teenage hippies," he headed for India, but eventually got booted out for overstaying his visa. Rather aimlessly, he went to the Persian consulate in Quetta, Baluchistan, where he scored a year's visa for Iran. "After that, I was hooked."

He discovered not only that mysticism was alive and well in Persia but that he could earn a living in Tehran just by knowing English. "It's really still the only talent I have." As the cultural reporter for little English-speaking newspaper, he had the freedom to explore fringe Islam as well as to meet the various avant-garde Westerns who passed through. Peter Brook gave him a job, and he almost slugged Stockhausen.

In 1974, a number of great Sufi scholars like Toshihiko Izutsu, Henry Corbin, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, backed with money from the Shah's wife, founded the Iranian Academy of Philosophy, an institute devoted to Sufi research. Wilson's studies and translations continued there until the revolution. "I went to a conference in Italy with an overnight bag and never went back. It wasn't really my fight exactly, and it tore my little world apart. Clearly in retrospect, the Shah was a violent son of a bitch who didn't deserve to survive. But I would make an exception for Mrs. Shaw. She's a very sweet lady and I owe her a lot of fun in my life so it would be churlish to make any remarks about her."

Both then and now, Wilson's own romantic and insurrectionary spirit was drawn by the marginal status of Islam in America. "It's appealing to try to speak for phenomena which are so thoroughly despised and misunderstood. Despite the fact that we have millions of Muslims in America, we still don't have a cultural image other than the dreaded Saracen from the Song of Roland, the brown-skinned terrorist. Islam is still the enemy, and being a cultural traitor had a certain appeal to me.

"I advise everybody to travel, and that in a somewhat Sufistic sense. As the Persians say, 'A jewel that never leaves the mind never acquires polish.'

"Of course, there's many ways to travel. There's tourism, there's traveling for business, joining a scientific expedition, visiting your relatives for the holidays. There's traveling in an army, which certainly is a very special way of moving across the face of the earth. All of these are different psychic modes.

"Travel for travel's sake is something very special.  To be free and to learn are the only goals for the pure traveler. You've got to be strong, and keep your psyche polished and bright and open and ready to engage. If you look on travel not just as something that's happening to you but as something that you're doing, it requires the spiritual will the Sufis call himmah. You have to be aware of yourself as this free-floating zone unto yourself. You can give it a spiritual interpretation if you want, but it's incredibly real. Because it's really you in that hotel suffering from Montezuma's revenge. It's not an idea of you or a simulacrum of you. It's really your body there on the line or at least on the toilet."

All this recalls the work of Hakim Bey, an intimate colleague of Wilson best known for his notion of the "temporary autonomous zone." As a surprisingly virulent concept/buzz-word, the "T.A.Z." has spread through the computer underground to Time magazine to the hippies at Rainbow Gatherings. Bey praises Wilson's contribution to Islam's anarchic spirituality, and Bey should know he served as the court poet in a small sultanate in western Pakistan until an anarchist bombing incident forced him to flee to the U.S., where he now splits his time between New Jersey and a hotel in Chinatown. Reached at his Air Stream in the Jersey wilds, Bey compares Wilson's take on spiritual travel the "T.A.Z.": "Part of travel is running away as well as running towards. It's no terrible thing to run away from something if that thing is trying to destroy you, like the Empire of Work. In travel you are a kind of floating zone.  You've got your whole little life with you in a suitcase. You become this bubble inside the cosmos running around, and you can make it autonomous or you can make it enslavement to misery depending on how much psychic energy you have."

For Wilson, there are tricks to travel. "The people I met on the road who were really getting something out of it would be people who would settle down in Jakarta for a year and study batik. They had a love affair, and that's the difference. The tourist's not in love with any of this stuff.

"Another trick is to avoid places that have lost their aura by being mechanically reproduced through the medium of tourism, by 50 years of Cook tours and American Express and camera-clicking. All those things vampirically suck the life out of difference, or suck the difference out of the Other. Just going to obscure places makes a lot of sense, even if the big famous temples aren't there. I encourage people to go to busy Third World ports and industrial cities where tourists never go because there's nothing to see. There you often find traditional life far better preserved than the Disney World version of the exotic Orient that you're gonna buy for a tour."

Wilson's reliance on the real may strike some as the kind of naivet vaporized by postmodernism. But this is a man whose gone through pomo. "Baudrillard's a smart guy but he's a terrible traveler. His writings on America make that very clear. He seems to see only the ironies that he expected to see." When Wilson talks about authenticity he doesn't mean pure unmediated experience. "It's not at all the pure that I'm interested in. It's the Real, and everyday life is the arena of the Real." Wilson speaks of the Real not only as a Sufi might speak of it, but as an cultural interventionist who remains in fierce, and no doubt romantic, opposition to the spectacle. For all of postmodernism's local truths, it remains the nihilistic metaphysics of the spectacle. "It's only now that we've reached the abyss of mediation that new paths appear. Of course they were always there, and actually involve a lot of archaic models.

"Travel plays a really important role in all this. It plays the opposite role of tourism, which nonetheless exists in a strange sort of dialog with travel, which goes along with travel at the same time and sometimes seems to actually become it. Tourism is a kind of travel that deconstructs difference. The kind of travel I'm talking about is to experience difference.  It's something you do with the body and probably ultimately the only really meaningful you do are with the body. Unlike tourism, which is the prolongation of imperialist colonialism, the kind of travel I propose is a prolongation of the heretical margin.

"Every once in a while tourists are converted into travelers. They notice that besides the image of otherness that they're paying for there is a reality of otherness that they fall in love with. They're attracted to it, even erotically, and they walk out the tour bus and into the world."

Making modifications

So, I've decided to do a little spring cleaning so to speak. Basically, over the next couple of days I'm going to recatorgize some entries so that they make a bit more sense.

I'm trying to fully integrate the idea of Scraps into this site. To do this I'm going to be posting various articles and essays to the site that I've come across, mostly from a Moorish Orthodox list that I'm on. I'm also trying to hack together an interface that alllows for easy access to these articles. Unfortunetly, it will probably be Aug. before I can really get into a serious redesign. To that end, I've "picked up" a copy of Dreamweaver and will hopefully be able to hack something together using that. Until then though I'll have to keep using this format and just messing around with categories untill I can get something that works.

Any suggestions or comments are encouraged. And that goes for the articles themselves. I'd love for people to use the comments to discuss the merits of individual articles or ideas sparked by them.

An old article

I'm trying to clean things up a bit, and make it easier to find things. Here's an article from Bey on the subject of "What is anarchy?" It was posted before with other stuff. Now I'm posting it on it's own

Questions and Answers on Anarchism

Hakim Bey

What is an Anarchist?

The Prophet Mohammed said that anyone who greets you with "Peace!" must be considered a Moslem. Similarly, one may consider all who call themselves "anarchists" to be anarchists (unless they're police spies);--that is, simply, those who desire the abolition of government. For the Sufi, the question, "Who is a Moslem?" holds virtually no interest. They ask, rather, "Who is this Moslem? an ignorant dogmatist? a hairsplitter? a hypocrite? Or is this one who rather strives to experience knowledge, love, and will, as one harmonious whole?"

"What is an anarchist?" is not the right question. The right question is: "Who is this anarchist?" an ignorant dogmatist, hairsplitter, hypocrite? One who claims to have smashed all idols, but who in truth has just erected new mental shrines to fresh spooks and abstractions? Does this one try to live in the spirit of anarchy, of not-being-ruled/not ruling-- or does that one merely use the rhetoric of rebellion as an excuse for unconsciousness, resentment and self-immiseration?"

The petty theological squabbles of the anarchist sects have grown inexcusably boring. Instead of asking for definitions (ideologies), ask: "What do you know?"--"What are your true desires?"--"What will you do now?"--and--as Diaghilev said to the young Cocteau--"Amaze me."

What is Government?

Government may be seen as a structured relation among humans whereby power is unevenly distributed, such that the creative life of some is reduced for the aggrandizement of others. Thus government operates in all relations in which the members are not considered as original partners in a structure of mutuality. Government can be observed therefore in social units as tiny as the nuclear family or "informal" as a chance meeting of several neighbors in the street--whereas government may never even touch certain much larger organizations such as a rioting mob or crowd of hobby enthusiasts, Quaker meetings or free Soviets, banqueters or benevolent societies.

Human relationships which begin with such original partnerships may become, through the process of institutionalization, subject to a decay toward government--a love affair may turn into marriage, a little tyranny of the miserliness of love; or else an intential community, founded freely to make possible some way of life desired by all of its members, finds itself ruling and coercing its children with petty moral rules, empty husks of once glorious ideals.

So the task of anarchy is never done for more that a short time. Everywhere and always human relations will always concretize into institutions and degenerate into governments. Perhaps one might argue that this is "natural?"....But so what?! Its opposite is also "natural". And if it were not, then I still might choose the unnatural, the impossible.

We know, however, that free (non-governed) relations are perfectly possible, because we experience them quite frequantly--and more so when we strive to create them. The anarchist chooses the task (also the art, the jouissance) of maximizing the social conditions for the emergence of such relations. Because this is what we desire, this is what we do.

What about the criminals?

The above considerations may be taken to imply a sort of "ethics", a working a mutable definition of justice in an existential and situationalist context. Anarchists should probably only consider as "criminal" only those who deliberately thwart the realization of free relations. In a hypothetical prisonless society, only those who cannot be dissuaded from such action may be subject to "people's justice," or even vengeance.

At present however we'd do well to realize that our own determination to cerate such relations now, even in imperfect non-utopian modes, will inevitably place us in a position of "criminality" vis-a-vis the State, the legal system, and probably the "unwritten law" of popular prejudice as well. Revolutionary martyrdom has long gone out of fashion--the current goal is to create as much freedom as possible without getting caught.

How does an anarchist society work?

An anarchist society works, whenever two or more people strive mutually, in an organization of original partnership, to achieve shared (or complementary) desires. No government is needed to structure a quilting bee, a dinner party, a black market, a tong (or secret mutual aid society), a mail network or BBS, a love affair, a spontaneous social movment (such as ecosabotage or AIDS activism), a group art project, a commune, a pagan gathering, a neighborhood
protection society, an enthusiasts' club, a nude beach, a Temporary Autonomous Zone. The key, as Fourier would have said is Passion--or, to use a more modern sounding word, desire.

How do we get there from here?

In other words, how do we maximize the potential for such spontaneous relations to arise from beneath the dead weight of a society suffocated by all the varieties of governance? How do we give passion a free rein to re-create the world each day in the original freedom of the "free spirit" and the group of shared desires? The $64 question--and really not worth a great deal more, since the answer can only be science fiction.

Very well then, my sense of strategy leans toward a considered rejection of the remnants of old "New Left" tactics such as the demo, media-performance, protest, petition, Ghandian resistance or adventurist terrorism. This entire strategic complex has long since been recuperated and commodified by the Spectacle (if you'll allow me a burst of Situ-jargon), and is perhaps no longer even worth the trouble of detournment.

Two other and quite different strategic areas seem far more interesting and promising . One is the complex summed up by John Zerzan in Elements of Refusal--that is, the refusual of widespread and largely nonpolitical scale of control mechanisms inherent in such institutions as work, education, consumerism, electoral politics, "family values", etc. Anarchists might well turn their attention towards ways to intensify and give direction to these "elements." Such action might fall in the traditional category of "agitprop" but would aviod the "leftist" tendency to institutionalize or "fetishism" the programs of any self-defined revolutionary elite or avante garde.

Action in the area of "elements of refusal" is negative, even "nihilistic," while the second area concerns itself with postive emergencies of spontaneous organizations capable of providing real alternatives to institutions of Control. Thus the insurrectionary actions of "refusal" is complemented and enhanced by
a proliferation and concatenation of "original partnership" relations. In a sense this is an updated version of the old Wobbly strategy of agitating for a General Strike while simultaneously building the new society within the shell of the old through union organization. The difference, I propose, is that the struggle must
be enlarged beyond the "problem of labor" to include the whole scope of "everyday life" (in the Debordian sense).

[Note: This would be the right place to address question number 9, "What's opur relation to other liberatory struggles?", which seems to be a subset of the question of strategy/tactics. Clearly the answer should be: Support them inasmuch as they're actually liberatory (radical ecotage, sexual minorities, etc.); criticize them constructively if they veer toward institutionalization (radical unionism, peace movment, etc) But also: let's keep our eyes peeled for where the action is. After all, isn't the uprising itself one of our "criminal pleasures?" Always a new horizon and we nomads or vagabonds, unable to resit its lure....]

I've attempted to make much more specific proposals in the title essay of The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, N.Y., 1991); so here I'll confine myself to mentioning my contention that the goal of such action cannot properly be designated by the word "Revolution"--just as the General Strike, for example, was not a "Revolutionary" tactic but rather one of "social violence" (as
Sorel explained). "Revolution has betrayed itself as just another damned commodity, bloddy cataclysm, one more turn of the crank of Control--this is not what we desire, but rather a chance for anarchy to shine.

Is Anarchy the End of History?

If the becoming of anarchy is never "done" the the answer is No--except in the special case of "History" self-defined as the privileged auto-valorization of the institutions and "governments". But history in this sense is probably already dead, already "disappeared" into the Spectacle, or the obscenity of Simulation. Insomuch as anarchy invovles a kind of psychic paleolithism, it has traditionally longed for a post-historic state which would mirror that of prehistory. If the French Theorists are correct, we have already begun to enter such a state. History as story will continue, for humans might almost be defined as animals
who make stories. But HIstory as the one official story for Control has lost its monopoly on discourse. Presumably this should work to our advantage.

How does Anarchy deal with Technology?

If anarchy is a kind of paleolithism, this does not mean we have to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. We're interested in the return of the Paleolithic, not a return to it. On this point I believe I disagree with both Zerzan and Fifth Estate, and so with the techno-futuro-libertarians of CaliforniaLand. Or rather, I agree with all of them, I'm both a Luddite and a cyberpunk, hence unacceptable to both parties.

My belief (not knowledge) is that a society which began to approach general anarchy would deal with technology on the basis of passion, that is, desire and pleasure. The technology of alienation would fail to survive such conditions, while the technology of enhancement would probably thrive. Wildness, however, would also necessarily come to play a major role in such a world, since wildness is pleasure. A society based on pleasure would never allow us to techne to interfere with its enjoyment of nature.

If it is true that all techne is a form of meditation, so also is all culture. We do not object to meditation per se (after all, our very senses mediate between the "world" and "brain"), but rather to the tragic distortion of meditation into alienation. If language itself is a form of meditation then we may "purify the language of the tribe";--it's not portry we hate but language as Control.

[Note: On anarchist technology, see Islands in the Net and Green days in Brunei by B. Sterling, near-future SF written as "utopian realism", in which desperately poor overpopulated third world countries make use of appropriate low-tech green and humane solutions to solve problems which already exist. Also see I. Ilyich's Energy and Equity]

Why hasn't Anarchy worked before?

What do you mean "Why hasn't Anarchy worked before?! It has worked thousands, of millions of times. It worked throuhout 90% of human existence, the Old Stone Age. It works in hunter/gatherer tribes even now. It works in all the "free relation" type groups listed above, from quilting bees to tongs. It works every time you invite a few friends out for a picnic. It "worked" even in "failed uprisings" like the Munich and Shanghai Soviets, Baja California 1911, Fiume 1919, Krondstadt 1921, Paris 1968. It's worked in communes, Maroon
enclaves, pirate utopias. It worked in early Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, in Paris 1870, in the Ukraine, Catalonia and Aragon.

The so called future of anarchy is a judgment made percisely by the kind of History we believe to be moribund. True, few of these experiments (except the prehistoric and the tribal) lasted a very "long time"--but this says nothing of any value about the nature of experience, of individuals and groups, who lived through such periods of freedom. Perhaps you can recall some brief but intense love affair, one which even now gives a certain meaning to your whole life, before and after--a "peak experience". History is blind to this portion of teh spectrum, the world of "everyday life" which can also become on occassion the scene of the "irruption of the Marvelous." Every time this happens it's a triumph for anarchy. Imagine then (and this is the sort of history we enjoy) the adventure of major Temporary Autonomous Zones lasting six weeks or even two years, the communal sense of illumination, camaraderie, exhilaration--the individual sense of power, of destiny, of creativity. No one who has ever experienced anything like this can admit for even one moment that danger of risk and failure might out weigh the sheer glory of those brief moments of rising up. As soon doubt the sacredness of that love affair, even if it ended in pain and misery!

Overcome the myth of failure and we will feel at once, like the cool breeze that heralds rain in the desert, the inner certainity of success. To know, to desire, to act--in a sense we cannot desire what we do not aready know. But we have known the success of anarchy for a long time now--in fragments, perhaps, in flashes--but real, real as the monsoon, real as passion. If it were not so, how could we even desire it, much less act to bring about its victory?

Originally entitled:

"The Willimantic/Rensselaer Questions"
Hakim Bey
from:
Anarchy and the End of History
pp. 87-92

Hakim Bey article

Thanks to Jim, we've got a new Hakim Bey article. A transmission from the A.O.A. (written in '87) It discusses the defectors that anarchy has seen over the years, and the need for a new form of anarchy.

POST-ANARCHISM ANARCHY

by Hakim Bey

THE ASSOCIATION FOR ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY gathers in conclave, black turbans & shimmering robes, sprawled on shirazi carpets sipping bitter coffee, smoking long chibouk & sibsi. QUESTION: What's our position on all these recent defections & desertions from anarchism (esp. in California-Land): condemn or condone? Purge them or hail them as advance-guard? Gnostic
elite...or traitors?

Actually, we have a lot of sympathy for the deserters & their various critiques of anarchISM. Like Sinbad & the Horrible Old Man, anarchism staggers around with the corpse of a Martyr magically stuck to its shoulders--haunted by the legacy of failure & revolutionary masochism--stagnant backwater of lost
history.

Between tragic Past & impossible Future, anarchism seems to lack a Present--as if afraid to ask itself, here & now, WHAT ARE MY TRUE DESIRES?--& what can I DO before it's_too_late_?...Yes, imagine yourself confronted by a sorcerer who stares you down balefully & demands, "What is your True Desire?" Do you hem & haw, stammer, take refuge in ideological platitudes? Do you possess both Imagination & Will, can you both dream & dare--or are you the dupe of an
impotent fantasy?

Look in the mirror & try it...(for one of your masks is the face of a sorcerer)...

The anarchist "movement" today contains virtually no Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans or children...even tho _in_theory_ such genuinely oppressed groups
stand to gain the most from any anti-authoritarian revolt. Might it be that anarchISM offers no concrete program whereby the truly deprived might fulfill (or at least struggle realistically to fulfill) real needs & desires?

If so, then this failure would explain not only anarchism's lack of appeal to the poor & marginal, but also the disaffection & desertions from within its own ranks. Demos, picket-lines & reprints of 19th century classics don't add up to a vital, daring conspiracy of self-liberation. If the movement is to grow rather than shrink, a lot of deadwood will have to be jettisoned & some risky ideas embraced.

The potential exists. Any day now, vast numbers of americans are going to realize they're being force-fed a load of reactionary boring hysterical artificially-flavored _crap_. Vast chorus of groans, puking & retching...angry mobs roam the malls, smashing & looting...etc., etc. The Black Banner could provide a focus for the outrage & channel it into an insurrection of the Imagination. We could pick up the struggle where it was dropped by Situationism in '68 & Autonomia in the seventies, & carry it to the next stage. We could have revolt in our times--& in the process, we could realize many of our True Desires, even if only for a season, a brief Pirate Utopia, a warped free-zone in the old Space/Time continuum.

If the A.O.A. retains its affiliation with the "movement," we do so not merely out of a romantic predilection for lost causes--or not entirely. Of all "political systems," anarchism (despite its flaws, & precisely because it is neither political nor a system) comes closest to our understanding of reality, ontology, the nature of being. As for the deserters...we agree with their critiques, but note that they seem to offer no new powerful alternatives. So for the time being we prefer to concentrate on changing anarchism from within.

Here's our program, comrades:

1. Work on the realization that _psychic_racism_ has replaced overt discrimination as one of the most disgusting aspects of our society. Imaginative
participation in other cultures, esp. those we live with.

2. Abandon all ideological purity. Embrace "Type-3" anarchism (to use Bob Black's pro-tem slogan): neither collectivist nor individualist. Cleanse the temple of vain idols, get rid of the Horrible Old Men, the relics & martyrologies.

3. Anti-work or "Zerowork" movement extremely important, including a radical & perhaps violent attack on Education & the serfdom of children.

4. Develop american samizdat network, replace outdated publishing/propaganda tactics. Pornography & popular entertainment as vehicles for radical re-education.

5. In music the hegemony of the 2/4 & 4/4 beat must be overthrown. We need a new music, totally insane but life- affirming, rhythmically subtle yet powerful, & we need it NOW.

6. Anarchism must wean itself away from evangelical materialism & banal 2-dimensional 19th century scientism. "Higher states of consciousness" are not mere SPOOKS invented by evil priests. The orient, the occult, the tribal cultures possess _techniques_ which can be "appropriated" in true anarchist fashion. Without "higher states of consciousness," anarchism ends & dries itself up into a form of misery, a whining complaint. We need a practical kind of "mystical anarchism," devoid of all New Age shit-&-shinola, & inexorably heretical & anti-clerical; avid for all new technologies of consciousness & metanoia--a democratization of shamanism, intoxicated & serene.

7. Sexuality is under assault, obviously from the Right, more subtly from the avant-pseud "post-sexuality" movement, & even more subtly by Spectacular Recuperation in media & advertising. Time for a major step forward in SexPol awareness, an explosive reaffirmation of the polymorphic eros--(even & especially in the face of plague & gloom)--a literal glorification of the senses, a doctrine of delight. Abandon all world-hatred & shame.

8. Experiment with new tactics to replace the outdated baggage of Leftism. Emphasize practical, material & personal benefits of radical networking. The times do not appear propitious for violence or militancy, but surely a bit of sabotage & imaginative disruption is never out of place. Plot & conspire, don't bitch & moan. The Art World in particular deserves a dose of "Poetic Terrorism."

9. The despatialization of post-Industrial society provides some benefits (e.g. computer networking) but can also manifest as a form of oppression (homelessness, gentrification, architectural depersonalization, the erasure of Nature, etc.) The communes of the sixties tried to circumvent these forces but failed. The question of _land_ refuses to go away. How can we separate the concept of _space_ from the mechanisms of _control_? The territorial gangsters, the Nation/States, have hogged the entire map. Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?

AnarchISM ultimately implies anarchy--& anarchy is chaos. Chaos is the principle of continual creation...& _Chaos_never_died_.

--A.O.A. Plenary Session
March '87, NYC

Notes on Heresey

A piece I wrote last night when I couldn't sleep. The original discussion that I had in my head was much better, but I guess this will do.

Audience: Am I to take it then that you feel heresey has an inherent higher power then orthodoxy?

Speaker: Not in the sense that you mean.

Audience: How so then?

Speaker: Do you agree that god is beyond the understanding of the human mind?

Audience: Yes

Speaker: Do you also agree that we can only perceive god through the use of metaphore, and that these metaphores constitute the entiriety of religion? That the various religions are simply different perceptions of this unknown universe?

Audience: Yes

Speaker: Then why should we follow the metaphores of the past? Is it even possible that we can understand these metaphores?

Audience: To a certain degree, yes we can.

Speaker: How so? Meanings have changed. The average Christian does not see the blaphious meaning of comparing the kingdom of god to a mustard seed. They do not even perceive the inherent paradox of the story. With out this understanding, how are they supposed to come to a true understanding of what is meant by the words?

Audience: Through study and meditation.

Speaker: But, by not living in the time that the metaphore was created, in most cases, not even in the region, how are they to understand the metaphore even through study and meditation? A person who has lived their whole life in the desert can not even begin to understand the ocean. No amount of study and meditation can bring the same understanding of what an ocean is, as standing on the shore and seeing it for themselves. And even that does not compare to the understanding of that of a seasoned sailor, who has spent years of their life living on the ocean.
No, it is impossible to fully understand a metaphore that was not created for you. And so we are left grasping at straws. Blindly moving from one path to the next searching for something that we can never find with in the walls of orthodoxy.

Audience: Well, how does heresy solve this problem? Does it not contain the same walls? What about these metaphores provides some universal metaphore?

Speaker: Heresy as an instance is of no more use then orthodoxy. That is not the point. Heresey as a movement though, contains the neccisary freedom. It allows the individual to approach god on their terms. To design their own metaphore and approach god themselves, instead of through another.
When the day of judgement comes, we will not be able to simply justify our actions by saying that we were doing what we were told to do. We must justify the actions by saying that this is how we beleaved we were supposed to act. And this understanding can only be accomplished through heresy.

Audience: But doesn't this theory allow for racism and murder to be justified in the eyes of god? Do all these monsters have to do is to tell god that they were doing what they felt was right, and that makes it good?

Speaker: There is a difference between doing just works because you beleave that is what god wanted you to do, and justifying your actions by saying that that is what you thought god wanted you to do. You can not approach the metaphore and go looking for justification. You must approach it with, what Zen calls, Beginer's Mind. You must approach it with no expectations. Only by coming to it with no expectations of answer, will you be able to truely understand the meaning. And once you have found your own metaphore, then it you simply must follow it. If you approach the metaphore with no expectations, and you still find justification for reprehensable actions, then your actions are just. But, I imagine that these cases are rare. Most, I feel, are simply justifying previous decisions with a metaphore. Here the metaphore is created after the fact. And this is wroung. The metaphore must predate the actions. The actions must come from the metaphore.

Audience: Does orthodoxy serve no purpose then? Are all who follow it, doomed?

Speaker: Orthodoxy provides a vocabulary for discussion. It allows people to compare metaphores, with out spending all their time defining terms. Where their metaphore follows othodoxy, then they can simply refer to orthodoxy.
Whether practitioners of orthodoxy are doomed, is not a statement I can make in a generalized fashion. If the individual truely beleaves that orthodoxy is the correct path for them. If it is their metaphore. Then it is just. If it is simply a crutch that they latch on to, so they do not have to go through the trouble of creating their oown metaphore, and deciding how to see the world on thier own. Then they are misguided, but they are not doomed. The line here, between doomed and misguided is a fine one. The line between misguided and justified in orthodoxy, is also a fine line. It must be approached on a per case basis, and it must be approached by the individual. Anything else is simply one individual imposing their metaphore on others. And this could be seen as the highest of sins.

Audience: So, if orthodoxy can be a justified solution, then why should people bother with heresy? Why walk the hard road, when the easy is right in front of you?

Speaker: Why should a person yern to be free, when they can still draw breath as a slave? Heresy, the defining of a personal metaphore, is the freeest form of spirituality. It is the person making the choice to live their life as they see fit. It is the person deciding that they wish to see god themselves. Instead of simply listening to other people's stories of god. This is why heresy must be followed, and why it is a valid choice before the traveller.

Book reccomendation

I just got my order from Fantagraphics today.

I'm still processing it all, but one book has already stuck out, and I'm sure it's a book that I'll spend the rest of my life flipping through.

The book is called The CAT On A Hot Thin Groove. It's a collection of cartoons and artwork from Gene Deitch for the jazz collectors zine, The Record Changer.

The comics, one panel deals with a little caption, are loving jabs at collectors. And are obviously written by someone who knows the fanatic nature of collectors pretty damn well. I'll be honest, most of the jazz references sail by mean. Since I'm not that well versed, but even if I don't get the direct reference, I deffinetly understand the spirit and the affliction of being a collector.

Highly reccomended, not just for jazz fans, but for all collectors.

Pack Ratting

I'm in one of those moods again. One of those moods where I just start hording various bits of information. The underlining idea is that one day I'll bother to process it all. Technically, this is the way I always work. I haven't read more then 10-20 pages out of, probably, half the books I own. I've currently got about 5-6 DVDs that I haven't watched. And two or three CDs that I haven't listened to yet.

It's not that I'm buying the things for the sake of buying them. I'm buying them for the moment that the impulse to input them strikes me. Some are an issue of buying things to late. I couple of weeks ago I found that I really had the urge to listen to Slayer, who I haven't listened to since high school. This feeling went on for about a week. Then one day I picked up an album, and before I could listen to it, a coworker mentioned Kula Shaker and I've spent the last several days listening to them. That's over now though, and now that I think about it, may be I'll listen to that Slayer album today. Most of the time though it's the, "this looks interesting"/"I heard really cool things about this" idea and so I buy it, and then process it when the mood strikes me. Ussually with DVD's and CD's it's not that long. Some of the box sets can take awhile to be fully heard/seen. But, that's becuase there's so much to them. And, it'll probably be awhile before I sit down and watch The Three Colors Trilogy, but that's becuase I've already seen all three films (in fact I own them on VHS) and so there's no real drive to watch them right now. But, one wet, cold, Sunday afternoon, I'll see them on the shelf and think, "let's watch French films!" and I'll watch them, and listen to the commentary tracks, and go exploring, and then I'll be so happy I bought them.

Short tangent, when I bought the trilogy, I also picked up Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. I first saw this film in my second year of college. Such a great film. Highly reccomended. And I'm so happy that it's finally on DVD. Now, I just need to pick up his other films.

You kno what though? This wasn't the point of this post. Nope. The point was to talk about the current flurry of purchases. It started with the announcement from Fantagraphics that they were having money trouble, and needed people to buy books this month, so they could cover their debts. So, I dropped a large chunk of change on several books that I've been meaning to pick up, but haven't. They should be arriving tomorrow.
Then a few nights ago, I was watching Chomsky on booktv, and he reccomended a book by Howard Zimm called, A People's History of the United States: 1942 to Present. I ended up picking the book up, and since I was doing some shopping, I went looking for other things and scored some cool used books; Scandal, studies in Islamic Heresy, Pirate Utopia's, and Drunken Universe; all three are Peter Lamborn Wilson books. And then last night, I started talking to a guy who's started a little group that distributes copies of out of print books and writings from various people. I'm sure I'll end up picking some stuff up from him in the not to distant future.

Information is good!

BTW, I'm listening to the Slayer album right now.